


she can taste it in her bones

by theElsker



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-26 21:56:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20396785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theElsker/pseuds/theElsker
Summary: She is a champion of the arena, and he is nothing more than a relic of the past.





	she can taste it in her bones

**Author's Note:**

> Female Courier re-imagined as Ranger Stella.

The man arrives at the Fort when the sun has fallen in the western sky, and the night has grown thick and damp.

Stella watches his body dragged across the sand, his limbs sprawled and loose. His face is awash with blood, trickling from his nose and mouth and down the edge of his chin. He disappears to tents near where Caesar resides. She had been there only once, when she first arrived, and still bore the scars of her survival.

She does not think of him again for a fortnight.

Instead, she hardens her body in Arena. Her fingers dig into the soft, pliable skin of the drugged Fiend, tightening until the sallow skin turns blue and his eyes stare up at the sky, the life strangled out. Her fists rip and drip with blood, and laughter bubbles from her chest when they drag back to her pen. 

She often dreams of those she has killed - the slaves, the captured innocent, and the amused faces of the Legion guards who did not think her worthy. 

When he is tossed into the pen near hers, it is the first time Stella sees his face. It is angles and hollow cheeks. He still struggles against his bonds, against the Legionaries that do not take kindly to it.

And she knows it will not take long to break him.

When they shuffle together, hands bound and lashes on their backs, his eyes are on her enough to make her wary, suspicious. His head bows towards her and, in hoarse whispers, he tells her he’s heard of her, that he was once a soldier out of McCarran, and her name is still known by the NCR.

She does not answer. She does not trust him.

But he is not Legion, and perhaps that is all that matters.

* * *

They tell her the Viper is in the pit, and she is to fight at midday. She braids her hair into a crown and dons her shift, the bloodied X painted on the chest. Whose blood she can no longer remember.

He comes to her as she stands in the doorway waiting to be taken to the Arena. Stella ignores all his muted questions save for the only one that matters.

_ Will you win? _

She is the Laurifer Gladiator.

She will win.

* * *

Otho, _ fucking _ Otho, leads her to the Arena gate and spits on her as she enters. The other legionaries often show her more deference than that, and she imagines how easy it would be to break Otho’s bones and feed the pieces to the dogs.

The Viper is already in the Arena when she steps onto the dirt. He towers over her, a body crisscrossed with black ink and the hatch marks from hundreds needle points, but she does not fear his skeletal frame or the way he stumbles towards her.

Her hubris did not often fool her, but the way the legionaries bite and wail in the stands above her gives her pause. It is a fraction too long, for the Viper strikes before she can prevent his fist from glancing off of her. It staggers her, and for the first time she sees the drug in his eyes. The way it begins to focus his gaze and tighten his limbs.

She takes another fist to her jaw that sweeps her backwards, but she returns a strike to his abdomen and a knee between his legs. He crumples for only a moment, long enough for her to dive for his legs. They grapple and twist, her fingers at his hair, his throat. He pounds her head into the sand and stone, her shoulders scraping and teeth rattling. The jeers of the legionaries boom around her and she is reminded that she does not fight for respect. 

Only survival.

Hands latch onto his throat, clutching and constricting, and her jagged nails cutting skin. Her muscles tighten, built and formed for this moment, and she waits for the sweet moment when his body slacks and sags. 

Then she is on top of him, her thumbs driving into his eyes. 

When she kills the Viper in the pit, his head snapped from his spine and eye sockets empty, she is a collection of bruises. Her hair, no longer blonde from the muck and blood, is in snarls around her face. Otho comes to collect her, but she is already thinking on the extra rations she will receive this night. 

* * *

Sometimes in the dead of night, when her eyes are crazed and breath is short, she remembers more than the taste of bread and water. The other slaves steer clear, but he does not scare so easily. He lays stretched out against the wall of the pen, his voice in the darkness often unintelligible, but she likes the sound of it. 

Sometimes his words are of the army across the water coming for them; the army the legionaries speak of in hushed whispers, the one she remembers a lifetime ago. 

Stella has long stopped believing in anything save the Arena. 

But that does not mean she does not like the way his lies settle on her skin and coil around her heart.

* * *

When he fights in the Arena, she keeps to the edge of the pen, watching the sky. When the billowing smoke from the fire that burns at the top of the pit turns a hazy red, she is pleased. 

The soldier is victorious. 

* * *

His first beating occurs only a few days latter.

The man is too slow reacting to a legionnaires order and suffers for it. She is the only one that watches the beating in its entirety. The legionnaires are cruel, but not deadly. They give him enough time to recover his breath, recover his wits enough to swing back, before circling him once again.

He is a good fighter, and they do not kill him. He has become too precious to the Arena, the odds of his winning too good and legionnaires have deep pockets to fill.

Flashes of anger cut through her, some remnant of a past she hardly remembers. She is not sure of herself anymore. But she is beginning to remember the laughter of comrades, the whispers of a previous life.

When he is tossed in the pen, he does nothing but wipe the blood from his face and stretch out in the dirt 

She crouches next to him as the rest give the man a wide berth and rocks back on her heels. He meets her gaze. His eyes are dark. He blinks at her mouth, the slope of her neck, her thin shift, then to her bruised and broken hands clasped in front of her.

“You are Stella of the NCR.” It is a whisper between cracked lips.

“Perhaps,” she says, eyes flicking to the sky between the bars. “But I haven’t been her in a long time. I haven’t known her in a long time.”

“The NCR pulled me from my post in Novak to find you.”

“Why? And why were you stupid enough to get captured?”

He started to shake his head, but then seemed to think better about moving. “Orders. NCR wanted someone on the inside.”

“You said I was NCR. I am on the inside.”

He levels his gaze at her, the whites of his eyes bright in the fading light. “A different kind of inside than you.”

“And you were stupid enough to agree.”

Boone lets out a snort of air, and then grunts in pain. “Yes,” he says, and then is quiet for a long time. “Maybe I thought...Maybe I hoped this would be my last mission. Find a way to you, and then…”

“And then?” She asks and doesn’t understand why he has grown silent again.

He sighs. A bruise is beginning to bloom underneath his eye. “And then I would take a few of these assholes out with me when I go.”

“Go where?” She wants him to say it. For its seems silly to her to die when he can fight. When he can triumph in the Arena for glory. 

But all he does is stare off ahead, silent.

“Where is the glory in that?” She asks.

His eyes meet hers again. “Where is glory in fighting when no one here gives a shit if you live or die?”

She rocks backwards and lets herself collapse in the dirt next to him. _ Glory. _Yes, that is what she fought for. Not in the beginning, but now, with the fear of dying having dulled like the scars on her hands, she barely thought of anything except the next fight, the next extra ration, the next time the crowd of legionnaires roared from the stands when the light would leave the eyes of another challenger. 

“I want to kill them all,” she says. “Sometimes they are foolish and challenge me themselves. They are too confident, too stupid to be afraid of me. Too scared to fail in front of their Caesar. I am not Legion. I do not need to fight with honor. What is it to me when glory will accomplish the same?” She thinks of all of the nights she has lived through to reach dawn. A sign of her relentless survival. A sign of her relentless victory.

She has whispered this very prayer many times, but he is the first listen.

“Saving you will weaken the legion. Political bullshit aside, escaping from here would mean you would be able to kill as many as you would like. Wherever they are left in this world. With all of the artillery you could want. The backing of thousands of men and women fighting for the same dream to kill every last Legion bastard.”

She mulls on this, turning it over in her heart. “First they will parade me through the streets, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“And then you and I will kill them all.”

She imagines the Legion will pit her against this man soon. He has lived through the beatings, survived long enough in the Arena. The legionnaires will be salivating at the thought of two remnants of the NCR fighting to the death. But where she would fight to the bitter end, that feral song of fury and wrath in her heart, he would likely refuse and give her victory. She feels only a small sting against her pride at this, for no one has denied her in battle before.

But she does not wish to kill him.

Stella, for her name was _ Stella _, watches the way he braces against the stone, and his hands wipe away blood and sweat and filth from his face.

A memory resurfaces, a hazy recollection of another man. Of a soldier who was captured and sold alongside her. Handsome and kind, with teeth so white they showed through the blood during their forced march east. The spark of his smile was gone before they reached Caesar’s Fort, and the life from his eyes soon after.

Stella is not sure why she thinks on him now, except that perhaps this man reminds her, again, of her past. And she likes the look of him - the strength of his jaw, the roughness of his palms, the breadth of his shoulders.

So she sits close to him, close enough to feel the heat of him in the chill of a Mojave night. 

* * *

A call to the Arena never comes.

When the ground trembles and quakes, Stella waits in the pen with the others. They huddle together in ignorance, and she wonders if the earth means to open and swallow them whole. A flag she once walked under, a double-headed bear of the New California Republic, materializes in the distance. The shouts of legionnaires scrambling past fill her ears. Smoke rises from beyond the gate, and chaos explodes before them.

He finds her huddled against the bars. He had been pulled to labor yard that morning, and she gasps at the sight of him. When he breaks the lock and pulls the door of the pen open, the others caged with her scatter past him. Suddenly, she remembers the Arena, the taste of conquest and the whip of the flog against her bare skin, and she cannot move.

His lips against hers are cool against her ear, and his fingers are warm on the skin of her neck. He pulls back, his voice like gravel, and she does not understand what he is saying to her.

But when his hand is outstretched towards her, she takes it. Their palms slide together, and she is pulled forward. The sunlight is too bright to see clearly, but her bare feet pound against the rock and sand. They fight their way to the water and slip their way to the other side under the cover of soldiers who stare at them in awe.

She does not remember the taste of freedom, but the stretch of desert before her and the dust that fills her lungs is a start.


End file.
